Health Access Sumbawa (HAS) does malaria control and community development work on a shoestring budget in a roadless area of Sumbawa, a relatively poor Island in Eastern Indonesia. In 2015 we set out to control malaria in three remote villages for the price of a car. Remarkably, we succeeded. Our systematic program involves prevention measures such as hanging insecticide treated bed-nets in every home, then screening the population for malaria with a microscope and providing effective treatment. *

Five years ago the coastal farming village of Sili (where HAS is based) had every development challenge you could think of: No reliable road, not much electricity, no public water, no toilets, no employers, no health clinic, no shops, no schooling past the 6th grade.

Everyone wants the benefits of technology. We take our comforts for granted and sometimes forget that there are millions of people still living without such luxuries as running water or a toilet. Poverty is a major hurdle to overcome, but lack of money is not the whole story. Large well-funded development projects can fail just as spectacularly as small grassroots efforts. There are many potholes on the road to development.

What follows is a series of personal stories and lessons gleaned from working in Sumbawa at the grass-roots level over the past five years.

The significance of roads

Everything we do is made so much harder because Sili village in central Sumbawa has no reliable road connecting it to the outside world. Some might say the area is not exactly roadless. there is a dirt track that’s passable by a 4 x 4 truck or a strong motorbike on a dry day. But after a rain, not even a dirt bike can make it up the steep greasy mountain track to Tolo’oi. Walking out is your only safe option in any weather.

The lack of reliable roads in Sili Village is a real issue for its inhabitants.

A road connects a community to hospitals, schools, government services, buyers and sellers. Minor equipment failures such as a broken pull cord on a chain saw can delay projects for days or weeks in a roadless area. No reliable transport means the sick stay home in bed instead of going to hospital, students quit school after the 6th grade rather than go out for junior high, farmers sell their crop at lower prices to the only broker who comes to their village, people go hungry when they run out of food in their kitchen, and government planners fail to fund development projects because so few people have ever visited the community to see the problems.

We lobby elected officials for a road. I’ve found it’s most effective to emphasis the economic potential of the roadless area rather than complain about the hardship of living off the grid. I’m sure the Bupati (the area regent-an elected position) had never heard of Sili and it’s “best beach in Sumbawa” before I told him about it. The next year there was a plan (but no funding yet) to build a road.

We develop relationships with strong skillful motorbike drivers to “taxi” HAS nurses and administrators around.

We found a reliable fishing boat captain for water taxi. HAS supplies passengers with U.S. Coastguard approved life jackets.

We bought two 29-inch mountain bikes for the clinic. Human-powered. Large wheels to handle rough terrain. Faster than walking.

Electricity- What went wrong with the ambitious solar grid?

A reliable source of electricity is another cornerstone of development. Even people in off-the-grid communities depend on cell phones and rechargeable battery powered lights these days.

In 2013 the government built a small community-based solar powered grid for Sili village. It was state-of-the art. Every home was connected by cable. The solar panels, inverters and batteries at the power company headquarters provided every home with enough power for a few lights, cell phone charging, and maybe a TV set for an hour each evening. the system even included street lights for the village.

The grid worked well for a year or two but by 2016 there were frequent periods of no service. One problem was cheating. Many people wanted to run a water pump or a TV. Homeowners soon figured out that they could bypass the metered connection to their house and take unlimited power directly from the pole. This caused the system to crash. Half the rate-payers stopped paying their modest $2 a month utility bill so the service technician stopped responding to calls.

There has been no electricity in the village for the past two years except at the power house. The three-room utility building has become a central charging station for phones and flashlights from all over the village. The room is a maze of power cords. People have decided that a central charging station is their greatest need for electricity. They’ve abandoned hope for a power grid that delivers electricity to their homes.

What went wrong? Perhaps the whole concept was too complex and, in the end, delivered too little power. The goal was to provide 300 watts per household, which is not enough to run water pumps, refrigerators, or power tools. People would still need a gasoline or propane generator for that. The grid never addressed that need.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there were more appropriate solutions to meet the modest power generation goals of the project. Two alternatives are:

Solar charging stations distributed around the village.

A decentralized program that places mini solar panels on each home. This decentralized concept solves several of the fatal flaws of the centralized grid. It eliminates the problem of cheating, and pushes responsibility for maintenance down to the individual household level. When a system fails, only one house is affected.

Solar powered lights are a reliable source in Sumbawa.

Some of the personal solar power technology available today is astonishingly good. One of my favorites is Waka Waka Power +, a solar powered power bank and LED light the size of a hand phone. The light is bright enough for my old eyes to read the smallest type, and the battery lasts many hours. We also use cheap solar-powered security lights for general lighting. They activate by a motion detector, so you have to wave at the unit from time to time to keep it on, which is amusing at first but eventually becomes second nature. You can also hang the light from a string and spin it, creating a disco effect. Yes, we actually do that.

Toilets- The dangers of doing it badly.

Promoting Toilets is another goal everyone can agree on. What could possibly go wrong? A few years ago the village government gave three bags of cement to every house as a way to encourage people to build toilet houses. Unfortunately, there was no design guidance, no supervision, no follow-up. Most people sold their bags of cement. A few toilets were built, mostly too close to their water well. The septic tank design was faulty, and within a year raw sewage was visible on the surface of the ground.

A bad toilet is much worse than no toilet at all. It becomes a hazardous waste site. The traditional “jungle floor toileting” used by people in rural communities disburses the waste over a large area where it breaks down quickly. It is nature’s system. As we promote widespread use of toilets, we really must teach about the risks of bad waste water system design.

Health Access Sumbawa has built four toilets in Sili village in the past three years. One is a public bathhouse/toilet in front of our clinic. We consciously designed the building site so the septic tank/field could be at least thirty meters from any well. Our toilets are the only ones in Sili village to have running water. By the way, the primary school in Sili village has neither a toilet nor water.

A squat toilet is available in the public bath house in Sili Village.

Few people used the public bath house the first year, perhaps thinking it could not possibly be for them. By the second year it became so popular we had a problem supplying enough water. People started to complain that the water tank was often empty when they wanted to shower. We have since added a second tower and another 1,100-liter tank.

Pumping water while off the grid

It is challenging to provide running water to a community with no electricity or public water system. You need electricity to run a water pump, unless you are lucky enough to have an elevated water source such as a mountain spring which flows by gravity.

We dig or bore a well by hand, then pump water into a 1,100-liter water tank which sits on top of a tower. The tower is not expensive to build. We construct it from local timber which has been milled into columns and planks using a chain saw. Once the tank is filled, gravity provides the water pressure. This works fine as long as your taps are lower than the bottom of the tank.

There are three ways we could pump water without a power grid.

Use a generator to power an electric water pump.

use a gasoline-powered portable water pump.

Use a solar or wind powered water pump.

Our first choice would be solar powered, because the fuel is delivered for free. Re-supplying propane canisters or gasoline cans is difficult and time consuming in a roadless area. It’s pretty common to run out of fuel, and resupply requires a full day of hazardous travel by motorbike. Solar water pumps move low volumes of water continuously whenever the sun shines. They don’t pump when the sun doesn’t shine. The pumps we found seem to work best when residential use can be paired with a trickle irrigation system for a farm. This is fine if you have the right situation. We’re excited about trying this pairing idea at our Beach Farm after we get the beach cottage built.

Solar pumps need a lot of storage capacity to perform satisfactorily in situations where demand for water peaks several times a day, such as a public bath house. For this application, a gasoline powered water pump is our most practical solution.

Advantages of portable water pumps-

Move more water faster and with less fuel than a pump powered by a generator.

Are affordable, rugged and easy to service.

Can be transported on a motorbike. We plan to use one machine to fill tanks in multiple locations.

Regarding safe drinking water, we have found that the Sawyer 0.10 microns hollow membranes water filter is reliable and easy/cheap to maintain. (Back-wash by hand. No replacement filters required). We have been using these for four years now. One unit can filter enough drinking water for several households and costs under $100. We have not tried to filter muddy water. Fortunately, our water doesn’t have sediment.

Malaria control in three years- but no quick fix to sustain the gains.

As with all HAS initiatives, sustaining progress is the hardest part of our malaria elimination work. There is no inoculation, no immunity for malaria. People suffer repeated bouts in endemic areas. The only way to sustain a low infection rate is to fund an ongoing health service. You need to provide primary health care with a malaria component. This is a much bigger mission than we originally signed up for. But there is no other choice.

It turned out that HAS could step into this added role quickly and cheaply by partnering with the government health service. HAS already had one of the best health facilities in the region, the only clinic with running water. We hired the government nurses working in adjacent villages to come to Sili two days a week on a staggered schedule so our clinic is staffed and open 6 days a week. Primary health care at our clinic is free to the public, including medicines.

A woman in Sili Village bathes an infant in fresh water.

Travel by motorbike over dirt trails is tough for the nurses, but the added income provides powerful motivation. Government salaries are so low, the nurses are able to double their monthly income by working two days a week for HAS.

Small is beautiful

HAS is a volunteer organization with no paid staff at headquarters. We have a strategic reason to stay small. As social entrepreneurs, we want the enterprise to become self-sustaining one day. The goal of sustainability is more realistic if we keep our program in scale with the local economy. HAS is working toward a budget of $100,000/ year, which is significantly more than the government currently spends on health care in our expanded service area, which covers 50 kilometers x 15 kilometers and about 7,000 people.

Our operating budget for the clinic is just $20,000 a year. A $15,000 challenge grant provided by The Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust (RHLCT.org) was the catalyst HAS needed to increase its total annual budget to $55,000 last year. These new resources allowed us to significantly expand our service area for malaria, and pursue a range of initiatives designed to improve access to clean water, sanitation, and adequate nutrition.

A lesson in humility -The limits of technology

One morning we were leaving Sili for a meeting in the city of Macassar. When I tried to fill the kettle to boil water for coffee, no water flowed from the tap. The 1,100-liter water tank had been drained dry by early bathers at the community bathhouse. I went to start the water pump but we were out of gasoline. To top it off, when I tried to light the two-burner stove in the kitchen, there was no flame. the propane canister was empty. Someone joked that we had timed our departure from Sili almost perfectly.

For a few minutes we were baffled. Then the solution became obvious: We needed to revert back to the traditional way of doing things. Someone got a bucket and a piece of rope to take water from the well. Others built a cooking fire in the garden. Soon we were enjoying our campfire coffee and delicious grilled fish, fresh-caught during the night by our neighbor, a rare treat. We had been humbled by the limitations of our hard-to-sustain technology, and were reminded that sometimes the old ways are most reliable.

It’s not easy to design sustainable infrastructure which is as reliable as traditional methods. Poor people will not choose to cook with gas when firewood is free and readily available. A solar cooker is fine when the sun shines, but it’s useless on a rainy day, after dark or inside the house. A good gravel road is better than a thin asphalt one. Potholes in gravel can be patched with local materials. Potholes in bad asphalt become money pits.

We have learned that people often revert back to their traditional ways rather than fix technology when it stops working. People want technology, but it must be reliable, durable and affordable. Keep it simple and easy to maintain. Avoid products with “consumable” parts to buy, such as replacement water filters or disposable batteries.

A squat toilet with a properly designed and located septic system is an example of old technology that works great. The squatting position is already used by villagers and is anatomically preferable to sitting, the toilet flushes with just a dipper of water, there are no moving parts to break, and no consumables to buy such as toilet paper. Users wash their bum with water using the dipper. Hundreds of millions of squat toilets are in use throughout Asia.

Another old technology that has been updated is the mosquito net. Today’s nets, woven from polyester yarn, are less likely to get moldy than the old cotton ones. They can be impregnated with a safe long-lasting insecticide that immobilizes insects. We use WHO tested nets, Permanet 2.0 size 190 x 180 x150 cm. We can place three of these large nets in a home for about $30 to protect the entire family. Any tears or holes can be repaired with a needle and thread.

There have been many potholes in the road to development in Sili. We fill them in as we go along as best we can. The journey continues to be the adventure of a lifetime.

*For more information about the HAS project in Sumbawa, see RHLCT.ORG under Grants (Discretionary).

Contributed by Jack Kennedy. Jack is the son of a public health doctor who specialized in tropical medicine. He grew up in the South Pacific and South East Asia. Jack went on to pursue a successful career in international business, including activities in Indonesia. A lot of his time since 2014 has been devoted to Health Access Sumbawa in his roles as founder, president, and chairman.

The Launders Trust has made a gift to the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) that, in partnership with the Rape Hurts Foundation (RHF), could provide far-reaching benefits to women and girls in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. Collecting water and fuelwood has traditionally been their responsibility. They are forced to walk long distances to isolated areas, often in the dark. Their cumbersome cargo slows their pace—putting them at a high risk of sexual assault and its life-altering consequences.

The women collect water from a local source.

The story of Jane, a 20-year-old woman from Butansi Village in eastern Uganda, illustrates the pain and heartache these women endure. Her dream of becoming a doctor was over in an instant when she hiked into the bush to collect firewood for her family one evening. She was raped by three teenage boys. Left sitting in a pool of blood, she pleaded for help from a man passing by. Instead of acting compassionately, he also raped her. Jane’s family blamed her for “enticing” her rapists and losing her bride price. She was vanquished from her home and left penniless, pregnant, and infected with HIV/AIDS. She must still travel across the same treacherous footpaths to gather fuelwood and water to support her twin children who were conceived as a result of the rape.

Hellen Tanyinga is shown with children in her village.

Yet, from the scattered ashes of those women’s and girls’ hopes and dreams, there are rays of light. Hellen Tanyinga is one of them. After many years, her rapist is still at large. She explains, “A lot of things run through my mind when I think of the attack, but what heals me is that I was able to start the Rape Hurts Foundation. I choose love instead of hatred, and I have turned my pain into a voice for the voiceless.”

Hellen reached out to the Solar Electric Light Fund, a Washington, DC-based non-profit that has previously received support from the Launders Trust to assist those living in energy poverty, to help address the problem of rampant sexual violence in rural communities. Together, the two organizations created a pilot program that puts clean drinking water stations illuminated with solar streets lights as well as wood-free, solar cook stoves within their community to vastly reduce the need to leave the security of their villages. The project includes revenue-producing services like a solar grain mill to produce flour, charging stations for cell phones, and a solar refrigerator to set up a cold drink business. In addition, they will charge a nominal fee for drinking water. These commercial stations not only assure that there is money to maintain and repair the solar equipment; they also provide work opportunities for the women who are being rehabilitated through the Rape Hurts Foundation. The project also provides electricity to the women’s safe house and the children’s center run by RHF. Hellen has about 120 mouths to feed every day!

If the resulting pilot project data makes a strong case for the concept of centralizing resources within villages, the intent of SELF and RHF is to make this model replicable and scalable for other organizations to adopt—leveraging the Launders Trust gift many times over.

Contributed by Karen Allen. Karen is the Development Director for the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) based in Washington D.C. Her work at SELF brings her full circle to her early career when she spent time in the bush in Central and South America, where she witnessed first-hand the consequences of energy poverty.

The Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust continues to enlarge upon its tradition of supporting parks in Fairfax County, Virginia. Drawing upon its past contributions of Arrowbrook Centre Park and the Arrowbrook Wetland Nature Preserve to the Fairfax County Park Authority in 2010 and 2011, in August 2018 the Trust dedicated the Arrowbrook Centre Dog Park. While not an asset of the Park Authority, the dog park is open to the public and serves residents of Arrowbrook Centre and its environs. The Dog Park is named in memory of the late L. Farnum Johnson, Jr., one of the Trust’s original 7 co-trustees and the first Chairman of its Board of Trustees. Mr. Johnson owned 2 Black Labrador Retrievers, Blackjack and Lucky, who always enjoyed their regular visits to local dog parks. Farnum’s long-held dream of a dog park at Arrowbrook Centre has not been fulfilled.

Residents of Fairfax County enjoy a concert at Arrowbrook Park.

The Trust also continues as a sponsor and chief benefactor of an annual summer concert series held in Arrowbrook Centre Park on Saturday evenings in July and August. The series commemorates the life of Ruth Launders and her beloved Arrowhead Farm, now the site of the Arrowbrook Centre Park. This series will mark its 8th consecutive year in 2019.

In addition, the Trust continues to expand on its support of Frying Pan Historical Farm Park, a popular Fairfax County park in Herndon. For many years, through a special agreement between the Trust and the Fairfax County Park Authority, the staff of Frying Pan has harvested hay at Arrowbrook Centre for use in feeding its livestock at Frying Pan Park. Last year, using a grant from the Trust to the Fairfax County Park Foundation, Frying Pan Park purchased a specialized “no-till” planter for its use in planting grass seed at various locations including Arrowbrook Centre.

Contributed by Jeffrey J. Fairfield. Jeff is a Virginia attorney who has practiced in Herndon, Virginia since 1978. He is also on the Board of Trustees of The Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust.

Historically, the Kingston Chamber Music Festival has served two distinct audiences: younger school children through its schools outreach program and middle age to older adults who have patronized the summer festival since its inception. This latter community is dwindling as age takes its toll. The KCMF Board recognizes an immediate need to safeguard the long-range stability of this celebrated organization by intentionally diversifying its audience base.

Thanks to generous support from the Launders Trust, the KCMF Board of Directors is able to address a key element of the current KCMF strategic plan: to attract and serve younger audience members in their thirties and forties who can help define, lead, and support the Kingston Chamber Music Festival over the coming decades.

As a Board, we are pursuing the following strategies to build a younger audience base:

1. Implementation of focus groups comprised of younger local concertgoers to determine present barriers to KCMF attendance and preferences among the 30-40-somethings for programming;

2. Exploration of opportunities for collaborative programming between the local Contemporary Theatre Company, the Pumphouse Music Works, the Jamestown Arts Center, the South County Art Association, and similar organizations;

3. Booking at least one or two Launders-sponsored, KCMF events in new venues with KCMF-endorsed crossover artists and programming, if findings so indicate;

4. Improvement of the KCMF digital toolkit to enhance social media and web interface for the purpose of strengthening sales, audience outreach and follow-up; and

5. Recruitment of talented younger individuals to the KCMF Board of Directors.

The focus of this targeted Launders funding opportunity is welcome. For the long-term health of the organization, we need to diversify our audience base. A small KCMF sub-committee, including our President and our Managing Director, who is a member of the thirty-something community is presently engaging in deep conversations with contemporary peers to ascertain barriers they perceive in KCMF concert attendance and what would have to change to attract their attendance/participation in the future. Focus group sessions around this topic will be convened in late November, either at the Contemporary Theatre or the Pumphouse Music works.

Additionally, we have booked concert space at the Pumphouse Musicworks for a crossover concert with KCMF artists in late February 2019. Natalie Zhu , Artistic

Director of the KCMF is in the process of confirming musicians for this performance, one who has an international reputation for his crossover endeavors. We anticipate that further programming for this audience will be in response to our findings from the focus groups and questionnaires.

We thank the Launders Trust Board of Directors for its investment in the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, and we look forward to keeping you all updated on our progress.

Contributed by Guest Author: Deborah Grossman-Garber. Deborah is an active member of the KCMF Board of Directors, a lifelong devotee of chamber music, and an amateur violist. She retired in 2015 from her post as the State of Rhode Island’s Associate Commissioner for Post-Secondary Education. She formerly served as director of Student Learning Outcomes Assessment at the University of Rhode Island. She earned her graduate degree in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California – Berkeley.

“Look! A squishy worm!” A small child lifts her mud-covered hand to show her teacher the worm she found on the preschool playground. Soon a group of children are gathered around the muddy patch, searching for more worms with spoons and shovels.

Later, after washing up and returning to their classroom, the teachers help the children document what they learned about worms: “They like wet places. Worms live under logs. They make dirt when they poop.” The teachers transcribe the words on a big piece of paper, spelling out the letters as they write. The children are eager to show their parents the document they created together.

This preschool in Madison, Wisconsin may be hundreds of miles away from the sophisticated financial markets of Wall Street, but a very important and smart investment is gaining value on that muddy playground. High quality early childhood programs, especially those serving low income families, createa rate of return at about 13% per annum, based on a study led by James Heckman, Nobel laureate and economics professor at the University of Chicago. According to Heckman, the value of preschool is delivered to society in the form of reduced health care costs, reduced crime, greater earnings, and other benefits as the children grow up and enter the workforce.

The study, called The Life-Cycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program, analyzes the effects of two large-scale preschool initiatives: The Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC) and the Carolina Approach to Responsive Education (CARE). Both projects provided quality early childhood care and education to children from birth to age five. Though these initiatives were implemented in the 1970s, Heckman’s work shows the outcomes are relevant today and suggest that the best public policy solutions, such as the funding of early childhood programs, address a combination of issues — such as education, health, and crime – in a coordinated and blended fashion.

The Importance of Empathy in the Classroom

In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Heckman described the study’s findings and spoke about the key elements of quality early childhood education. Hiring good teachers is a significant challenge, but defining good teaching can be even harder. Heckman comments, “There have been a lot of studies, serious studies, that show that many of these so-called guides to what makes a good teacher — in terms of things like number of degrees or number of teacher credits and on and on and on — are really worthless in terms of predicting who’s a good teacher. What is important is finding this empathy, this ability to work with people, the engagement.” Heckman goes on the describe empathy as the ability to engage with a child in a conversation that challenges children to ask questions and think deeply.

Finding an early childhood program where teachers engage with children in meaningful conversations can be difficult, especially in low-income communities. One model that emphasizes this type of child-centered curriculum is the Reggio Emilia approach, named for the Italian city where the model was developed more than 50 years ago. Schools that practice a Reggio Emilia approach do not use a pre-written curriculum – the activities and lessons are developed through a collaboration between children, teachers, and families. If the children demonstrate an interest in a topic, such as worms, the teachers facilitate the development of a learning project that may last for weeks or even months. In the example of the worm study, children learn vocabulary and literacy skills as they ask questions about worms and write down their ideas and observations. They also learn early math skills when they measure and count the worms, in addition to the many science concepts covered during their outdoor explorations.

An Arts Integration Approach

The muddy playground described earlier is part of a unique early childhood program called Preschool of the Arts (PSA) in Madison, Wisconsin. PSA serves 200 children, starting as young as 18 months old. The importance of empathic, responsive teaching, as described by Professor Heckman, is emphasized through the integration of the arts in the PSA curriculum, including visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), music, and dance. Following a Reggio Emilia-inspired curriculum, teachers facilitate long-term investigations based on children’s interests. Project topics have included far ranging subjects such as birds, tents, planets, bones, and goats. Recruiting and retaining exceptional teachers who are able to lead this type of responsive, child-centered curriculum requires a level of funding that is not typical of early childhood programs in the United States. The primary source of income at PSA is parent tuition, which is relatively high for this Midwest community. As an independent nonprofit organization, PSA must seek resources beyond parent tuition in order to serve an economically diverse population of children and families and, thus, create the lasting economic benefits described in Heckman’s research. The support of the Ruth & Hal Launders Charitable Trust helps Preschool of the Arts expand its reach by providing funds for both tuition assistance as well as outreach programming.

At Preschool of the Arts, developing community partnerships is another important strategy for implementing quality early childhood programming that provides benefits beyond the walls the of school. In the summer of 2018, PSA launched a new outreach program that involves a series of child-centered art classes for low-income Head Start students in Dane County, Wisconsin. The classes are taught by PSA staff members who are trained and skilled in both arts integration and trauma-informed care. A grant from the Ruth & Hal Launders Charitable Trust supports the development of the pilot curriculum, the staffing and implementation of the classes, as well as the art materials and children’s books that the Head Start teachers will use to extend the benefits of the art classes into other elements of the children’s program.

Frederick Douglass once noted, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” The benefits of these initiatives that expand access to quality early education will extend well beyond the time these children spend in a preschool classroom. As decades of research into early childhood education has proven, we will all profit from these early investments.

Contributed By Guest Author: Ann Gadzikowski. Ann is an author and educator with a passion for challenging children to think creatively and critically. A graduate of the Erikson Institute, Ann has more than twenty-five years of experience as a teacher and director of early childhood programs. She is the author of curriculum books, teaching guides, classroom readers, and numerous publications for parents of young children. Ann serves as executive director of Preschool of the Arts, a Reggio-Emilia inspired school in Madison, Wisconsin. Ann is a frequent speaker at professional conferences, such as the National Association for Young Children.

The Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust has truly helped meet the needs of radio listeners in Central Virginia through its support of the Community Idea Stations. The Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust has provided funds for operating support of the stations and has helped to encourage the partnership of other listeners in the community by supporting on-air challenges broadcast during membership drives.

Public Radio Stations differ all over the country, but they have one thing in common: they require public support to thrive. Being community-supported, they reflect the diverse, particular nature of their localities. Community Idea Stations in Richmond, Virginia, offers both news/talk programming (88.9 WCVE) and music programming (93.1 and 107.3 WCVE) as it serves Central Virginia.

Public Radio Meets Needs of Listeners

Public radio stations exist to serve the members they support, not to meet the demands of advertisers. National Public Radio (NPR) Member Stations, share a mission to inform the public, increase understanding of the world and enrich the experience of everyday life. Each Member Station determines its own format and schedule. Stations create their schedules based on the interests and needs of their local audience. Some stations focus on news and information while others follow a music format – with programming ranging from classical, to jazz, or world music.

In Richmond, for example, WCVE members’ dues and community support like that of the Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust, paid at the local level, support local news created by its own news team, and also support national and international NPR news and analysis. This non-commercial partnership encourages creation of content that responds to listeners’ needs and interests, rather than content driven by advertising. This format allows examination of critical issues in depth and encourages honest discourse from all points of view.

NPR Member Stations and Community Partnership Results in High-Quality Content

Many public radio stations across the country are NPR members. NPR Member Stations are independent, locally owned and operated broadcasters. About two-thirds of these stations are licensed to, or are affiliated with, colleges or universities. The remaining third are governed by community-based boards. The Community Idea Stations offers news/talk programming on its 88.9 channel as an NPR Member Station and through subscription to other content providers.

NPR, headquartered in Washington, D.C., offers content to which these local Member Stations subscribe. National dues for joining are paid by the local station and generated through member and community support.

Member Stations are partners with NPR in newsgathering. Member Station reporters provide hundreds of news pieces every year, putting NPR News on the scene wherever news happens. Station reporting makes up a key part of NPR’s national newsmagazines and newscasts, and is especially critical for the

coverage of milestone news events such natural disasters, the impact of war on local communities, and national elections. These reports bring local flavor, relevance and perspective to NPR programs, with local reporters and hosts who are deeply familiar with the issues, events and people they cover.

In a time of media fragmentation and sound bites, NPR and Member Stations have succeeded in focusing on in-depth, high-quality news. NPR has evolved from a secondary to an essential news source, with dozens of bureaus around the world and the nation. Drawing on more than 340 news staff (reporters, correspondents, newscasters, editors, producers hosts and bloggers) in the United States and abroad — from Washington, D.C., and New York City, to Beijing and Dakar, NPR has the capacity to stay on top of breaking news, follow the most critical stories of the day and track complex issues over the long term. Since 1971, NPR and its journalists and programs have won hundreds of awards including some of the most prestigious honors in journalism.

Public Radio Offers a Front Row Seat to the Arts

Public Radio stations often offer broadcast content that would not be commercially viable, but that still holds great importance for our culture and society at large. They are uniquely able to do this because of member and community support.

In Richmond, Virginia, for example, the Community Idea Stations’ WCVE Public Radio delivers Richmond’s only radio home for daily classical and jazz music on channels 107.3 and 93.1, perhaps offering a young child his or her first experience of these musical forms. The station offers a unique platform for the local symphony and classical groups or local jazz musicians to share their work with the community at large. In addition to offering locally produced music programs, the stations also offer outstanding subscribed national programs like Sunday Baroque, Performance Today, With Heart and Voice and much more. For the audience, the station offers a front-row seat to expand their awareness and enjoyment of these music forms.

Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust gifts have helped local arts organizations like the Richmond Symphony, the Virginia Opera, and others extend their reach beyond live audiences. Its support has helped expand audiences for major local music festivals like the Richmond Folk Festival and The Richmond Jazz Festival, through the Community Idea Stations’ live broadcasts.

Delivery of this deeply sourced and high-quality news content, as well of delivery of outstanding locally produced and nationally subscribed music programs, is made possible by individuals and community organization partners all over the country. For Central Virginia, the Ruth and Hal Launders Charitable Trust, has been a significant partner in making sure that public radio is alive and well, delivering the best in news and music for area listeners.

Contributed By Guest Author: Trish Poupore, augmented with content from NPR.org. Trish Poupore has been director of major gifts at the Community Idea Stations for seven years.